The Things That You Don't Like…

I am sure you enjoy that dish in that restaurant otherwise you wouldn’t have picked that restaurant and that dish a few moments ago.

Now, let us engage in a thought experiment. How about you preparing that dish all by yourself? Your first reaction may be that you don’t want to do it. You may also have a very good excuse for not doing it – something like you don’t know how to cook. Take each objection one by one and if you spend enough time and energy on each one of them you can overcome them and one day you might be able to prepare the dish all by yourself.

The question – should you do it?

Is it worth your time to go through all this when you can go to your favorite restaurant and have that dish for less than $10?

May be. May be not.

It depends on what you think of that journey to get to the point where you have the capacity to prepare that dish.

If you enjoy that journey, it won’t seem like work.

If you don’t enjoy that journey, the process seems like a nightmare.

With that in the background, let’s get to think about some of your goals and ambitions. The journey towards them are filled with many (I mean MANY) tasks that you may not enjoy. There will also be many tasks that you will totally enjoy. But when you are engaging in those tasks that you like, you forget that you are working. You just complete them. That leaves the tasks that you don’t enjoy doing. How you view these tasks that you don’t like will determine how fast you will move towards your goals.

I am not suggesting that you should start loving the tasks that you don’t like. That is not the point. There is a reason that you don’t like those tasks. It might be difficult to change that. However, there is no reason to make these tasks give you a “license for inaction.”

The objective of this short article is not to provide you a set of strategies on how to handle them but to make you think about your approach towards those tasks. Unless that changes to something that supports “action” (rather than “inaction”) there is limited progress.

It is easy to spot the symptoms for this problem. If you have a number of projects that are half-done and they have been that way for a prolonged period, you are suffering from this disease.

You could fix it but “wanting to fix it” may be a task that you don’t like much 🙂